ABSTRACT
Civil society was the category in terms of which the aesthetic meaning of the thing could be judged. It was itself the standard and the condition of possibility of the beautiful. This connection is not entirely absent from Agnes Heller's term 'symmetric reciprocity', which is used throughout this essay. Modern sociology renders relationships beautiful in this way precisely because it deals with them from an allegedly disinterested position. Maffesoli makes a series of useful points when he reflects on the ethics of aesthetics and the emergence of neo-tribalism, but the conclusion he reaches is actually not terribly original. The boundlessness of the milieu of strangers did not give rise to the overwhelming presence of a multiplication of particularity outside of the bounded community of civil society. The result of the sensual inability to grasp the sublime is, then, a reconstruction of the universal ability of the individual subject to know. The individual subject is nothing other than a universal legislator.
